Goal #1 Complete - Marathon Race Recap

If your confused about my title here, I'm referring to my 27 for 27 goals. 

RACE RECAP

The morning of the race my stomach was doing flip-flops, and I was wondering if I had trained enough or correctly, but for the most part I felt steady.  Basically, I realized that there wasn't much worry was going to do a this point anyway.  While I was shivering in the corral, I randomly ran into a couple of my coworkers, and we gave each other mini-pep talks.

The whole marathon training thing has felt incredibly surreal, and somewhat crazy to the point that I haven't fully realized what I've been doing.  10 miles is the farthest race I've done previously, so more than doubly that distance is pretty significant.  For some reason, it wasn't until I reached the 5K mark of this race, that I realized - I'm really doing this.  I've really trained, I'm really going along on this marathon course.  And the first tears were shed.       

I started the race out feeling strong, and for the first 10 miles I felt hardly any fatigue and very little discernible pain.  Between mile 10 and 15 I started to slow down some, but only lost a little off my overall pace.  It really helped that I saw a lot of friendly faces at that interval so to keep strong.  Here's a picture of me captured by the boyfriend at mile 11:

Smiling!

Shortly before mile twelve - I saw my friend Lauren, and not too much longer down the line I saw an old friend from high-school who had shown up to see someone else run but recognized me on the course.  One of the best things about this course is the amount of crowd support.  This is my first marathon, but others have reiterated that Twin Cities really does have good crowd support.  There was loud music, live bands, great cheers and signs everywhere.  I was almost always within ear-shot of music, or a rousing round of "Go Runners!"

Must be something about my personality I really enjoyed the signs that incorporated a little bit of humor such as "Worst Parade Ever", "Running 26.2 miles, because 26.3 would just be crazy", "Great Job! Totally Random Stranger!" and "If this were easy, we'd do it!".  I saw that last one around mile 22ish, and it still got me to chuckle.  

At mile 15 I had maintained a 12:15 pace (approx), which is better than I've ever done for that distance.  After that I slowed down considerably, but I kept moving.  It helped that at mile 19 or so, I made a running friend, we'll call her Lena (not real name).  Here's a picture of me and Lena running:

Lena and me both had significant ankle pain at this point and time, so we used each other to keep pace, keep running when we could and finish with a medal.  Lena and I kept each other positive and strong and we stayed running much more than I might of alone.

Less than 1 mile to the finish, my sister and brother-in-law showed up and started running with me! which was the second big tear-jerker moment of the race.  Not too much later I saw my Dad and he started running with me too for a bit, but I could not hold his pace at almost 26 miles in.  I tried and was starting to get out of breath.  My dad is an annoyingly fast 50 yr old. 

What it means to finish
 
Not all, but almost all marathons have some sort of course time limit.  Twin Cities limit is 6 hours, technically the finish line stays open until 2:15pm, which 6 hours and 15 minutes after the gun time, but not everyone crosses the start line right away.  I was in the 3rd corral and crossed the finish line at about 11 minutes post gun time.  If you don't cross the finish line by the designated time, you do not get to be declared an "official" finisher, and you don't get a medal or a T-shirt. 

Now, while going a distance of 26.2 miles is phenomenal in and of itself, and something that anyone should be proud of no matter the pace, but believe you me - I wanted that medal and T-shirt!  

So - I did it 5:42:22, it wasn't exactly fast, and it wasn't necessarily pretty, but I became a marathon finisher!

 And I got a medal

Water never tasted so good...